This smitten newsreader was so engrossed in texting her boyfriend she walked straight into a freezing canal - and the hilarious episode was captured on camera. CCTV footage shows Laura Safe, 27 - who joked that she should change her name to Unsafe - plunging into the icy water of the canal in Birmingham.

A passing businessman is seen trying to warn Miss Safe to look out, but by the time she takes her eyes off her phone, it is too late.

The heroic passer-by, 34-year-old Neil Edginton, rushed to Miss Safe's aid as she flailed about in the water, watched by open-mouthed diners at the city's Mailbox complex.

The Capital FM Breakfast Show newsreader emerged unharmed and merely embarrassed at falling into the water in front of so many onlookers.

'I thought ice on the canal was pavement because it looked dark in the corner of my eye,' the newsreader said.

'I heard a man called out "stop" to me and I looked up at him, but it was too late by that point.

'I tried to get my balance and ended up slipping into the canal. But not before I'd saved my handbag and mobile phone.'

After her fall, Miss Safe tweeted: 'Oh dear. I should really be called Laura UNsafe after the day I've had! Lol.'

The newsreader praised Mr Edginton for saving her, 'Baywatch style'.

'This man came running up Baywatch-style, grabbed my hand and pulled me up. He was a hero and saved my life,' she said.

Mr Edginton, from Solihull, is a director at the company that developed the Mailbox complex where Miss Safe tumbled into the water.

She added: 'I brushed myself off and hoped that no one saw. But I turned around and the whole of Pizza Express at the Mailbox were there and the staff came running out.

'I told them I was fine, but they dragged me in, put me in the disabled toilet and gave me a cup of tea and a towel.

Following her topple, she spent over an hour drying off and staff at the pizza restaurant even gave her a spare pair of shoes to wear.

Miss Safe, who has been reading the news on the radio station for several months, phoned her rescuer on-air to thank him for his heroic efforts.

Birmingham is thought to have more canals than Venice in Italy. There were 174 miles of canal in the city in the middle of the 18th century, but it now only has 114 miles of them, with each remaining navigable water.